Adam Drew took a relatively traditional career path to his first-ever CFO role, landing the top financial seat at Kyriba, a San Diego, California-based provider of a cloud-based treasury and finance platform, in March. 

A native of Wales, the 39-year-old Drew earned a degree in accounting and economics from Cardiff University in Wales and is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Earlier in his career he spent eight years at Deloitte and most recently was group director of FP&A and reporting at the open-source tech company SUSE.

While proud of his own experience, he doesn’t think there’s one ideal track for entering the world of finance; noting that he began his career at Deloitte alongside sharp colleagues with backgrounds in cardiac nursing and chemistry.  

“I think you can learn the numbers. I don't think that should be a barrier to anybody getting into finance,” he said. “Ultimately displaying competence has to be up there when you step into the CFO role. Whether that competence has been learned from the start of your career or later on, I don’t think it matters but you do have to be competent.” 

Eating your own ‘dog food’ 

Prior to Drew’s arrival, Kyriba had been operating without a permanent CFO for over a year. Hamza Benamar was the company’s finance chief from 2020 through 2022, according to Benamar’s LinkedIn profile. The company operated with Christina Barakett as interim CFO after Benamar’s departure.

Founded in 2003, Kyriba started out as a white label cash management platform which has grown organically to become a cash, payments and treasury platform focused on liquidity. The company reports it now has roughly $300 million in annual revenue and its tools are used by about 3,000 customers. 

Drew is also part of an overall new leadership chapter, with Kyriba having appointed Melissa Di Donato, who also hails from SUSE, as its CEO last year. At the same time, it is also shifting gears strategically. The company, which is majority owned by the private equity firm Bridgepoint, has navigated a “lean patch” in which liquidity was its main focus but is now poised to focus on growth, he said.  

Partly due to Kyriba’s business, Drew feels a strong pull to optimize the operations of his finance team because the company serves CFOs who use the cloud-based platform for cash and risk management, payments and a variety of solutions for connecting executives with relevant data and keeping close track of working capital. 

“We have to eat our own dog food. We can’t purport to be supporting CFOs and treasurers if we’re not fully embracing everything ourselves,” he said. 

Mindset shift

Drew is inheriting a finance team of about 40 people that has been through a period of change, and, like all CFOs coming into new companies, he has some ideas about what he’d like to focus on in his early days in the seat. His priorities include getting the company to use data more effectively and building out the FP&A function.

“We're very good at keeping the score at the moment, but we're not very good at supporting the business and decision making and so we've got a little bit of mindset shift to make which is in progress,” he said.

For example, he’s working to double down on closely connecting treasury and FP&A functions. While the company has access to a substantial amount of data and people who are keen on using that data, it doesn’t always put those two together. That can mean anything from running projects on minimizing monthly payment fees to minimizing the FX costs and analyzing whether the company needs more U.S. dollars or Euros.

Ultimately, better data analysis will be crucial to one of his biggest concerns as CFO: making sure the company is ready to seize opportunities. “We will file our taxes. We will pay our employees — we will pay whoever we need to pay, that’s a given really in any functioning finance team,” he said, in response to a question on what keeps him up at night. “But for me my biggest concern is missing an opportunity...whether that is liquidity based or whether it is optimizing the results of the company..that’s where I think my focus is really going to be.”